VacationSelector

Edinburgh or Philadelphia?

Two destinations compared on nine measures of openly sourced data. Weight what matters to you and the verdict follows.

Your match

Edinburgh
✓ Best match
58
match

Wins on beaches & swimming and good for families with your weighting.

Philadelphia
51
match

Wins on nature & day trips and year-round weather with your weighting.

What matters to you?

Pick a travel style or drag the sliders. The match scores above update as you do.

Scoreboard

Each measure scored 0 to 100. Open a row for the figures behind the score.

EdinburghPhiladelphia
Beaches & swimming. Edinburgh leads by 55 points.55
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score550
Swim season months00
Beaches 10 km201
Coast distance3 km13 km
Water distance3 km
Places to eat. Philadelphia leads by 7 points.7
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score7077
Restaurants within 2 km of centre1,0231,714
Effective number of cuisines within 2 km3535
Museums & heritage. Philadelphia leads by 3 points.3
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score5760
Museums within 10 km3089
Museums within 2 km of centre2248
Share of museums within 2 km %7354
Unesco sites within 50 km31
Nightlife. Edinburgh leads by 5 points.5
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score6459
Drinking venues within 4 km1,193930
Drinking venues within 2 km of centre884575
Share of drinking venues within 2 km %7462
Nightclubs within 4 km6541
Nature & day trips. Philadelphia leads by 14 points.14
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score3549
Protected land share 50 km %214
Landscape blanket share 50 km %10
Land share of disc %8589
Park area within 2 km166 hectares75 hectares
Good for families. Edinburgh leads by 19 points.19
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score7253
Tourist attractions within 2 km8716
Park area within 2 km166 hectares75 hectares
Theme parks within 30 km04
Sights concentration. Edinburgh leads by 6 points.6
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score6054
Notable places within 2 km12688
Min wikipedia languages55
Value for money. Edinburgh leads by 11 points.11
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score5443
Price level global84.9100
Daily budget
Year-round weather. Philadelphia leads by 9 points.9
EdinburghPhiladelphia
Score5160
Monthly daytime high6.6 °C to 18.8 °C5.2 °C to 31 °C
Monthly rainfall43 mm to 80 mm69 mm to 112 mm
Dry months00
0255075100

When should you go?

The figures behind each month. Each row is shaded against that destination's own year, so the deepest cell is its best month for that measure and the palest its weakest. Shades are not comparable between the two rows.

J
F
M
A
M
J
J
A
S
O
N
D
Daytime high, °C
Edinburgh
7
7
9
12
14
17
19
19
17
13
9
7
Philadelphia
5
7
12
18
24
28
31
30
26
20
13
8
Sea temperature, °C
Edinburgh
7
6
6
7
10
12
14
14
13
12
10
8
Philadelphia
No coastline within reach
Rainfall, mm
Edinburgh
62
47
47
43
49
63
65
69
55
80
68
63
Philadelphia
79
69
101
88
86
103
111
109
112
88
74
101
Daylight, hours per day
Edinburgh
8
10
12
14
16
18
17
15
13
11
8
7
Philadelphia
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
14
13
11
10
9
Sunshine, hours per day
Edinburgh
2
3
4
5
6
5
5
5
4
3
3
2
Philadelphia
4
5
6
7
9
9
8
9
7
7
5
5

Temperature and rainfall are thirty-year climate normals, averaged over the years shown. Edinburgh: 1991-2020 normals, Edinburgh Airport (10 km from centre). Philadelphia: 1991-2020 normals, Philadelphia International Airport (11.3 km from centre).

WorseBetter

Getting there

Flying fromEdinburghPhiladelphia
LondonLHR, LGW, STN, LTN +2
1 h 20 m
€41-45
EDI · 11 km
7 h 20 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
PalmaPMI
2 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
8 h 5 m
no fares
EWR · 117 km
ParisCDG, ORY, BVA
1 h 40 m
€78-108
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
7 h 40 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
MilanMXP, BGY, LIN
2 h 20 m
€75-101
1 stop
EDI · 11 km
8 h 25 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
DublinDUB
1 h 5 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
6 h 50 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
AtlantaATL, PDK
8 h 15 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 55 m
€60-108
PHL · 11 km
BostonBOS, PSM
6 h 30 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 10 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
ChicagoORD, MDW, DPA, PWK +1
7 h 40 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
1 h 55 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
CancunCUN
9 h 40 m
no fares
GLA · 78 km
3 h 25 m
no fares
PHL · 11 km
MarrakechRAK
3 h 55 m
no fares
EDI · 11 km
7 h 35 m
no fares
EWR · 117 km

The busiest departure cities for these two, with a place kept for each other part of the world. Busiest means arriving passengers where an official count exists, and where none does, the number of non-stop services flown: official route statistics are published by the European reporting countries and by nobody else, so a table ranked on them alone would offer a reader in New York or Tokyo ten European cities. Flying times are estimated from the distance between airports, and every row is a city flown non-stop to both. Where the typical offer connects anyway, the stops are shown. Under each figure is the airport the flight lands at and how far that is from the centre, because the nearest airport is not always the one a route is flown to. Where both columns name the same airport it is one flight, and the difference between the two is the distance printed beside it. Typical return fares for 2026-08 to 2026-10, cached market data up to 7 days old. The figure is the middle half of the offers found, so a single price means they agreed and a range means they did not; for a typical route that middle half spans about a quarter of the median, and for the least settled routes rather more than the median itself.

Before you go

MeasureEdinburghPhiladelphia
Official languageEnglish
CurrencyPound Sterling (GBP)US Dollar (USD)
SocketsG230 V, 50 HzAB120 V, 60 Hz
Driving sideLeftRight
Time zoneUTC, UTC+1 in summerUTC-5, UTC-4 in summer
Emergency number112 or 999911
Elevation47 m12 m
Main airportEdinburgh Airport (EDI)11 km from centre158 non-stop destinationsPhiladelphia International Airport (PHL)11 km from centre128 non-stop destinations
Public holidays this year10 days12 days

By the numbers

MeasureEdinburghPhiladelphia
City population488,0501,603,797
People per km²1,8844,339
Museums within 10 km3254
UNESCO World Heritage sites within 50 km31
Distinct cuisines in the centre7875
Swim season, months above 21 °CNone

Where else could you go?

Every comparison below shares a destination with this one, so you can follow Edinburgh or Philadelphia somewhere new.

Browse every destination we have measured

Sources

© OpenStreetMap contributors, data available under the Open Database Licence. Place counts include data from Overture Maps Foundation (CDLA Permissive 2.0), assembled from Meta, Microsoft, Foursquare and other providers. Notable-place counts from Wikidata (CC0), weighted by Wikipedia language editions. Structured data from Wikidata (CC0). Weather data by Meteostat. Meteorological data provided by NOAA, DWD and others. Sea surface temperature from NOAA OISST v2.1, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Airport data from OurAirports (public domain). Public holidays from Nager.Date (MIT). Exchange rates via Frankfurter, based on European Central Bank reference rates. Non-stop route lists from the "Airlines and destinations" tables on English Wikipedia airport articles, by Wikipedia contributors, reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Currency from the ISO 4217 register maintained by SIX, cross-checked against country data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Price level from World Bank open data (PPP conversion factor for private consumption and official exchange rate), CC BY 4.0. Time zones from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0); clock offsets computed from the IANA time zone database. Daylight hours computed from each destination's latitude using the NOAA solar position algorithm. Typical fares from Travelpayouts (Aviasales data). Route-level air passenger statistics from Eurostat, © European Union, reused under CC BY 4.0.

Scores follow rubric v2; snapshot generated 2026-08-31. Typical prices can be up to 7 days old. Daily budgets are estimates from country price levels.